Tag Archives: philosophy

All it takes is one shocking first sentence saying something like men are a waste of precious genetic material to launch everyone’s mind into a routine frenzy. I’m referring to the gender “man” by the way and not the primary species that currently populates the earth. But come to think of it, wouldn’t it be better if we were dogs because dogs are much friendlier to each other, and they’re more diverse so that some dogs don’t look like dogs at all but bears or wolves or rats, and they have much better spontaneous intercourse at the end of which they find it extremely painful to separate–unlike humans who just want to sprint toward the door the moment the deed is done? Considering everything, maybe the world is better run over by dogs.

But how about cats? Cats have the most stupid videos on the Web and they’re able to sell those videos so easily because they’re natural, straight-faced, cold-blooded mofos who are in the middle of a history-long master plan to kill their human owners and take over the earth. At some point, every thought just comes to that: how to rule everything and everyone around you. It’s like it’s hardwired into our brains to plant our flags and leave our babies on every square inch of the universe that would take them. Or even if they won’t take them, we’ll find a way to shove them down their throats because we’re extremely good at forcing our way in and surreptitiously making our way out. But we’re not all bad. We invented hot pancakes smothered in butter and maple syrup, after all.

Pancakes show the good in people. No, you don’t have to watch Schindler’s List to know we’re not too ripe for the culling; pancakes which took thousands of years to perfect illustrate why we should keep on living here without an asteroid the size of Texas bothering us out of our sleepy daydreams and early erections. But don’t worry because the whole point of progress anyway is minimizing risks: including reducing the risk of annihilation-by-asteroid to virtually null. Think about it. Calendars were devised long ago to predict the seasons, so that crops can be grown without nasty floods destroying all of that tribe-nourishing food, and computers were built to avoid costly errors by alcoholic accountants whom their loved ones left because they only loved math and alcohol, which may be the same thing at the core. Every bit of development we have achieved and aim to achieve has one ultimate goal: reduce the risk of living.

Which is why I firmly believe the very concept of chance is getting destroyed every day. You don’t have to wait for a serendipitous moment nowadays to find the love of your life; there’s an app that will help you narrow down your goals to that one perfect person who was fertilized by their parents to forge your future fetuses with you. Or basically, fuck. Oh there you go, I’ve successfully avoided mentioning that word for three full paragraphs but now I just said it and there’s no turning back. But I found that if you start saying “fuck,” you should certainly make the most out of it because grading sins or unethical behavior is probably done by brackets and saying fuck once is just as good or just as bad as saying it ten or so times but not twenty or thirty times. So fuck it. Fuck my office pantry. Fuck my neighbors’ nightly fight. Fuck Mars, there’s absolutely not a single fucker to be found on it. And fuck the moon, too, we’re not going the fuck back to that fucking natural satellite filled with fucking rocks. Fuck Bin Laden. I can somehow trace all this recent fuckery to his fucked up existence. Fuck the police. And of course, fuck the government for good measure.

All right, now that we’re done with all that cursing and we feel just a little bit more unsalvageable than before, we think of beautiful things. Like love. It’s always best to end something random with love because it’s a force that unifies by glossing over the ugliness of whatever heterogeneous mixture we’re talking about (think about your past relationships and see that I’m right). It’s the one discovery that really matters and the one legacy that our civilization would leave behind that will totally confuse the aliens that will land here on a spaceship in the year 8149. Of course, I’m assuming aliens don’t and won’t have any concept of love because if they do, then that would make them essentially no different from humans; in fact, that would absolutely make them human because love is a uniquely human emotion.

Or that’s what I’d like to believe. Must be the pancakes I ate this morning.

A life without meaning is a life not worth living. If you wake up every day not really knowing why you should even go on and not just go back to sleep for all eternity, well, one could say without being too blunt that you’re overdue for a personal session with the good ol’ rope and bucket. To help you avoid such a gruesome ending to your days, and be a complete human being who greets the world with a sunshiny smile every morning, we have compiled tried and tested ways that will aid you in your desperate search for that elusive meaning of existence.

1. Travel around the world! — Have you ever stopped to wonder just how tiny the portion of earth you’ve covered contentedly going to and fro your office every single day? Shame on you if you haven’t even visited another country or gotten to know a different people! Everyone knows you won’t find any meaning in the same boring hellhole you’ve been living in for the past 25 years. The secret of existence is a precious nugget of knowledge only starving people in the slums of Asia and the deserts of Africa can give you. In exchange for some clean water. And chocolate bars.

2. Start living the beach life. — Did you know that all life came from the oceans? Yes, evolution tells us that we all started out as glorious sea creatures before adaptation gave us ugly legs that enabled us to walk the earth, thus, effectively condemning ourselves to centuries of toiling this godawful land. It’s high time we go back and embrace the high tide. Sell all your belongings and move to a seaside community where you’ll be in touch with your early evolutionary roots. But we don’t mean just spend your days getting a tan and riding a banana boat–that stuff is for common tourists who might as well drown themselves for living meaningless, hedonistic existences! You have to sell everything, even your clothes, and essentially… become a fish. You can start by cutting gills into your neck.

3. Surf! — Of course, not everyone is ready to go full fish. That’s ok. You can still be one with the water while retaining your mammalian respiratory system by surfing! Get your own surfboard and start riding the waves, contemplating the purpose of all this–everything around you–in between troughs and crests. Propelled by that strange force only the laws of physics can sufficiently explain, you can begin by pondering that question pulsating right at the very heart of this existential conundrum: why are you trying to stand on a plastic plank in the middle of a goddamn body of water? Also, why are you listening to reggae and acting all Rastafarian when you don’t really give a shit about anything except the height of your waves? These are basic philosophical puzzles that you will nonetheless fail to answer because you have the attention span of a Brazilian wax landing strip.

4. Climb mountains. — Meaning is one of the hardest things to get on earth, second only to 8 hours of sleep. So if you can’t find meaning on the seafloor, it could be on a mountaintop. Pack your mountaineering equipment and brace yourself for hours and hours of miserable walking like a Hobbit on a mission to Mordor. Hiking is a prime, literal example of the journey being more important than the destination because discovering the key to the mystery of Being lies along the arduous trek to the top. What basically happens is that you’re putting yourself in so much unnecessary pain and anguish that when you finally see there’s nothing at the top but the same crappy soil you’ve been trudging on forever and a sky that looks as plainly sky-ish as skies get, cognitive dissonance kicks in and you tell yourself blatant rubbish like “Those people down there need to see this or they’re missing out on life.” Maybe. Or maybe they can just simply look at your pictures on Facebook in the comfort of their own basements while munching on Cheetos.

5. Do yoga. — Meditation is so passé. Unless you’re ready to go full monk and burn yourself (alternative to going full fish), you’ll never find meaning in mere meditation. What you need to do is yoga. It’s deep and hip, and it’s filling your Instagram with mutant women doing cartwheels. This spiritual and ascetic discipline from India is your expressway to existential enlightenment–and the best part of it is you can do it every day after work or on weekends (if you’re a filthy casual). Stretch your muscles in various torturous ways and bend yourself in horrific shapes reminiscent of nothing less than the human centipede. The goal is to achieve complete spiritual calm in the midst of all this bodily chaos. The more farts you unintentionally release and the more bones you crack, the better. Snapping your own neck and rendering yourself in a vegetative state actually gets you nearer Nirvana because perfect immobility opens up all those stubborn chakra valves that get in the way of true self-understanding.

6. Collect things or build stuff. — The very purpose of our opposing thumbs is to enable us to hold little things that our ape cousins can’t. You’re wasting your potential as a perfect crafting machine if you keep your hands idle. So get into the building business and start disappearing for days only to randomly reemerge in the living room with a neckbeard and stinking of vomited nachos to the utter shock of others. You may also collect stuff like action figures, stamps, dried bugs, toenail clippings, and your neighbor’s underwear (if you’re that kind of sick). The point is to shut yourself in so much and drive yourself to unholy levels of unkemptness that the world will only be too happy to leave you the fuck alone. And in those long, lonely moments when your introspection is at maximum, you’ll surely stumble upon some kind of meaning to the utter madness. If not, well, at least you have a badass sailing ship replica that screams “voluntary self-castration.”

7. Fall in love! — How often have we all heard that love is the answer? Well, it doesn’t matter how many times we hear it because it’s true–love is the answer! Or rather, it’s kind of a lazy summary of the answer. The answer in its complete form is this: “You are an incomplete shell of flesh who’s pretty much useless and obviously pathetic if you are unable to find someone who has a great need to suck your face in public. Someone who has such a great appetite for sucking your face in public that he or she will do it frequently and over a lengthy period of time even as you start showing him or her the true you who’s an overall idiot and couch potato. Once you find this strange person with an insatiable need for sucking your face, never let him or her go because you’ve made it, baby, and it’s all that really matters in life.”

8. Drink. — And finally, when all else fails, drink. Gulp that alcohol down until you find some meaning at the bottom of the glass. Repeat ad infinitum if no sobering existential epiphany happens. As a last resort, you may try breaking that glass or bottle against the table and then holding the jagged teeth close to your heart. Do it quickly like you’re grabbing the hand of someone you love whom you’ve not seen in a long time. Trickling blood is a good sign life is finally leaving you, and you’ll soon be able to ask god himself just what the heck the point of living is. Of course, you’ll soon find out that everyone up there already knows the big secret; they’re laughing their butts off about it every day before sermons. Too bad none of them can actually go back and tell the tale, including you.

Oftentimes I would find myself on the brink of correcting someone on Facebook when they’ve made a particularly idiotic comment, but then just before I hit the Enter button, my hand would stop in mid-air, I’d press backspace, delete the entire thing, and say to myself, “Fuck it. Forget it.”

Something’s definitely amiss. The feeling’s strongest on Sunday mornings when I just want to sit in a chair and stare at garden plants with a retarded smile on my face.

I think the problem is that I don’t have a problem–not anymore. I used to have a collection–a library of problems! When I was younger, I would make a problem of just about everything: my coffee (“It’s too expensive, farmers died for this!”), the watch I wore (“It’s not working but I’ll still wear it because time is an illusion.”), the train (always been a problem that one), somebody’s boyfriend (“He’ll clearly not make her happy!”), rat carcasses on the road (“The perfect symbol for this rotten system!”), my spinster professor (“Projecting our arid sex life and general wish to die on our students, aren’t we?”), and stuff that everybody made a problem of–government and religion.

Those were the days! I could commute to school or to the office without listening to the radio or an “MP3 player” because I would be endlessly entertained by the hubbub of problems in my head. I’d be riding a jeepney and thinking, “Look at all these dead-eyed passengers just wasting away their lives going to and fro their cold cubicles when they could actually make a difference by saying ‘We’ve had enough! We’re crashing this pathetic jeepney into our pathetic buildings and torching our pathetic desks and stealing all the free coffee from the pantry!'”

Used to be I thought of things like that all the time.

I literally had stacks of journals all filled with my problems; they were written in volumes and could have served as an exhaustive catalog of humanity’s issues. The sheer size of the collection indicating the inordinate amount of time spent on such a dark, fruitless, lonesome activity would creep anybody out. My problems on love alone probably filled around three full notebooks. They discussed everything from the difference between love and lust to a theory about love as a disease that needed to be treated, sort of like the flu. They were absolutely fascinating! Because problems are fascinating things when written down or printed on paper, almost like old-school porn magazines. As an aside, it was always better to jerk off on those tattered pages than these gleaming cell phone screens.

But as I said, I don’t have those problems anymore. I wake up and the first thing I think about is not “Am I waking up to the real world or am I just a simulation like in The Matrix?” I wake up these days and I think, “Have I emailed that guy from the sales team yet?” And it’s terribly sad because that is not a problem at all. That’s a minor inconvenience or a daily task that may be bothersome to do but will nonetheless be accomplished that day or at some point in the future.

It’s not a problem.

Or it’s a problem but not a “real” one. It’s fake as hell.

‘Cause to me, real problems don’t necessarily seek answers; most of them have answers that are glaringly evident. Take for example the classic problem of: “Why do people keep on stealing others’ belongings when the world is already going to shit as it is?” That’s a legitimate problem right there and one worth thinking about leisurely while the very life is getting squeezed out of you in the jam-packed train. It can serve as a full-body anesthesia. You could spend an hour and a half looking at the different angles of that problem and trying to beat that voice in your head in a furious schizophrenic debate. That even though the answer is fucking obvious: “People steal because they’re poor as rats and even those who are rich still rob because they want more in this state of things where having more means having a greater fucking life. Having a big house is different from having a mansion is different from having your own freaking building and a private jet is different from controlling the entire country from your bathroom while you’re taking a shit.”

That’s a straight answer but nobody really wants that. It takes the fun away from nitpicking things that gnaw in our brains and our conscience. Straight answers are boring. The real problems are fun because they are never meant to be answered, only repeatedly considered in a semi-unconscious manner, like speaking a calming mantra, or squeezing a stress ball… or caressing your pet cat’s fur.

Something happened along the way–most probably aging–that made me lose all my precious problems. I think the overall lack of elasticity in the skin that produces wrinkles as one gets older extends to the brain, so that your once taut and springy mind progressively becomes soggy. And the physical sogginess of your brain matter is projected on your every view and every emotion such that your default face eventually starts to look like cold, overcooked pasta.

Of course, it could also be that thanks to your hard work and just the macroeconomics of it all (which you really don’t want to think about because you now have the attention span of a teaspoon), resulted in a pay at a level where the act of spending became more satisfying than questioning the ultimate purpose of spending. I mean, goddamn I can spend my wallet empty on Batman action figures without giving a shred of a thought! Who cares what you think of my hobby? Or what Marx would say about Batman? It’s the goddamn Batman for Christ’s sake! The Dark Knight that I deserve and need right now.

Sometimes, I also think it has to do with just being generally battered in love. I have a deep suspicion that love is the costly fuel that drives all goals and motivations in life. You don’t have love, sucks for you, because you won’t be launching any kind of revolution any time soon; instead, you’ll be sitting in a chair looking at garden plants with a retarded smile on your face. It’s not as fun to ponder love anymore and frame it philosophically or in some form of romantic literature when the plain fact is you’re just miserably failing at asking women out. Or outright getting seenzoned on Facebook. Or worse, unseenzoned (girl already posted three times that day about her cute, little puppies but still hasn’t opted to open your message).

And few men would admit it, but I sincerely think that every time a man fails at love or in romantic relationships, the damage is never confined to that space only. Rather, the ripple effects of that text message that was sent to you to tell you you’re a piece of shit that she would never date again touch on all the facets of your life: your work, leisure, morality, spirituality, in the very way your brain serves you the first thought of the morning. So that instead of feeling freshly intellectual when your eyes open, you just feel like you need another shot of Game of Thrones fan theory and a soggy McDonald’s cheeseburger.

I would like to craft a proper ending to this one but you know what? Fuck it. Forget it.

Like this:

Life is too short to be content with commonplace ideas and philosophies society bombards us with. What use is being called Homo sapiens, “the thinking man,” if we refrain from using every bit of time we have left to enhance our meditating faculties? So in the interest of the purely rational mind and for the sake of posterity, we have compiled a list of intellectual tasks and mental exercises you can perform to expand your mind:

1. Start reading serious books. — Stephen Hawking didn’t become Stephen Hawking by reading Spider-Man, and Ayn Rand didn’t come up with Objectivism by immersing herself in sleazy romance novels! Chuck out every non-serious, fun, and emotional book or reading material you have in your shelves and start collecting those leather-bound tome-like ones without any pictures. If the font is smaller than size 8, that’s a good sign you’re in the right direction. Burn everything else. Burn your magazines, children’s books, photo albums, closet, dog, house–everything. Burn your parents for starting you on Sesame Street instead of Plato.

2. Die a little. — Genius is measured in doses of personal misery, so do not give up reading even if simply going through page 3 of a treatise by some long-dead German philosopher makes you want to tear up and slash your wrists. You’ll get used to the loneliness of walking the sacred path to knowledge after a while. Losing friends is another good sign that your lifestyle is evolving from the slobbery to the scholarly. Do not live for today. Live for the future! History will prove you right even if the present vomits you out violently like too much tequila.

3. Send a clear signal that you are not part of this pathetic game of mediocrity. — There’s a logic that governs everyday life, which the masses in their mass consumerist hysteria are not able to perceive. But you do. You see the master puppet behind the veil of illusions they call “life.” In many ways, you are like Neo in The Matrix. Your eyes pierce through the deceptive simulations to unveil the code in green Chinese characters that fall randomly on the screen. But nothing is random–and you know that in your very heart and soul. There’s some secret meaning to this, usually encapsulated by a quote on Instagram if you search #instaquote. You have to post that shit when you find it to wake others up from their artificial dreaming state and launch the bloody revolution against the machines!

4. Be a political T-rex! — Yes! Like the apex predator of the Cretaceous period, you must devour everything in your path with maximum savagery. Begin your day with a rousing breakfast of Facebook and Twitter skirmishes about the country’s foreign policy, have a violent lunch of some fool’s misogynistic, sexist argument, and close it out with a gory dinner of CNN and BBC. By the end of the day, you’ll be shitting Vladimir Putin’s face in your toilet bowl.

5. Talk in codes. — Nobody understands you because you are Alan Turing reborn. Haruki Murakami with extra wasabi. Yoko Ono on steroids and the beating heart of Jaden Smith’s Twitter account. Plants vilify you in the chasm between the primate amygdala and reptilian metacarpals. Buttermilk splash in your eyes when the red dawn of the event horizon explodes like a gokkun glass on the floor. Space pizzas and gorilla tits. Pimple soup. Keanu Reeves. Exactly.

6. Go on an intellectual diet. — Put that nasty bag of Cheetos where it came from and start picking up brain food. But 100% organic greens are just the start of a dietary overhaul designed to build your brain muscles. The extra vitamins and nutrients you need cannot be found in the grocery store–hell no! Go to the nearest bookshop and start tearing out pages of books in the self-help and history sections. Stuff these fiber-rich pages in your mouth and proceed to swallow. Choking is a hazard but few are those honored to die for knowledge!

7. Watch art house or go home. — Who the fuck needs another Iron Man or Batman movie? Jesus! Every single one of these Justice League of Fantastic Avengers had dead parents who they need to avenge by using ridiculous powers from extraterrestrial beings or super high tech gizmo bullshit. Instead of watching these mind-numbing popcorn flicks, go see art films that discuss the true nature of life and of existence. Have you seen Synecdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufman? It’s about this play about the people making the play, where the play depicts the making of the play, and each play is played out ad infinitum. It’s like Playception. Imagine living your life without seeing this movie and deciphering its hidden meaning! You might as well kill yourself now if you don’t have a copy of this film because your cultural taste is as worthless as nipples on a superhero costume!

8. Don’t forget to smoke. — Every bookworm worth his salt knows that smoking is one of the sure signs of expanded brain capacity. You could almost say sticking a big, fat pipe of nicotine is the ticket to the exclusive knowledge-is-power club. So never forget to light it up lest people start to suspect you’re a mental wuss and a buffoon. Be sure to puff that shit when you’re writing dark haiku on Tumblr or just casually reading Elite Daily. The more cigarettes, the better. Stick some in your ears, too, to stop hearing your blithering moronic friends talk about fun things like music and side boobs.

9. Do some head exercises. — Finally, work your muscles out! We’re not talking about doing puzzles and crosswords–no, sir or ma’am! Those things are for kids. We’re talking about literal head exercises aimed at creating more space for your growing cranium. Follow these steps: (1) Stand next to a wall. (2) Put your hands firmly on your side. (3) Observe proper posture–do not slouch! (4) Breathe deeply for 3 minutes. (5) Knock your head against the wall repeatedly as hard as you can until your cranium cracks and your brain noodles spill onto the floor.